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The Great Man by Kate Christensen

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Also by Kate Christensen:

Good Company, June 2026
Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook
The Sacred & the Divine, October 2025
Hardcover
Welcome Home, Stranger, December 2024
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
Welcome Home, Stranger, December 2023
Hardcover / e-Book
Blue Plate Special, July 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
The Astral, June 2011
Hardcover
The Great Man, May 2008
Paperback
The Great Man, May 2008
Hardcover

THE GREAT MAN
By: Kate Christensen

Doubleday
May 2008
On Sale: May 12, 2008
320 pages
ISBN: 0385518455
EAN: 9780385518451
Hardcover
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Fiction

From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist.

Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subjectβ€”the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail, an autistic son, and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painterβ€”all duly noted in the New York Times obituary.

What no one knows is that Oscar Feldman led an entirely separate life in Brooklyn with his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their twin daughters. As the incorrigibly bohemian Teddy puts it, "He couldn't live without a woman around. It was like water to a plant for him." Now two rival biographers, book contracts in hand, are circling around Feldman's life story, and each of these three womenβ€” Abigail, Maxine, and Teddyβ€”will have a chance to tell the truth as they experienced it.

The Great Man is a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-gardeβ€”of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostlings for position behind the glossy facade of artistic greatness. Not a pretty pictureβ€”but a provocative and entertaining one that incarnates the take-no-prisoners satirical spirit of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

Media Buzz

Weekend Edition Saturday - May 10, 2008